Samsung Creates Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux

Samsung has created and added a new file-system to the Linux kernel aimed at solid state hard drives. The Flash-Friendly File-System, or F2FS, was added to the kernel by Jaegeuk Kim and contains around 13,000 lines of code. The post to the Linux kernel mailing list described F2FS as "a new file system carefully designed for the NAND flash memory-based storage devices. We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage. Also we remedy some known issues of the very old log structured file system, such as snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead. Because a NAND-based storage device shows different characteristics according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme aka FTL, we add various parameters not only for configuring on-disk layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms."